The Government Accountability Board said in a release Monday that it and local election officials around the state have been receiving an increasing number of questions and complaints and recent mailings that contain errors that could interfere with voting.

One of the mailings in question from the Republican Party of Wisconsin incorrectly told residents in the heavily Democratic areas of Madison and Dane County to return voter registration applications to the town of Albion, even if they did not live there.

Board director Kevin Kennedy recommends that voters rely on information from their local municipal clerk's office or the Myvote.wi.gov website.

One of the mailings in question from the Republican Party of Wisconsin incorrectly told residents in the heavily Democratic areas of Madison and Dane County to return voter registration applications to the town of Albion, even if they did not live there.

As reported by the GAB:

The biggest problem with mailers this election cycle is that some of them contain incorrect return mailing addresses for municipal clerks. Many voters received mailers from the Republican Party of Wisconsin, for instance, that mistakenly included a return address for the clerk’s office in the town of Albion in Dane County.

10 postcards could be an error. "An increasing number" only mailed to "heavily Democratic areas of Madison and Dane County" are clearly outside the realm of error. Or, for comparison sake, let's say Stu goes out and gets drunk and goes home with Althouse. Clearly an error. But if he goes home with Althouse AND Mrs. Blaska together, then it's clearly outside the realm of error;)

bdog, you're right the AP account differs from the GAB release. I assume that's because the AP reporter (probably Scott Bauer) actually practiced journalism and called GAB to get more information which went past the deliberately limited press release. Do you have any reason to doubt what AP reported?

Who would they send the mail pieces to? It sure wouldn't be City of Madison residents. I would hit rural Wisconsin and Waukesha county.

Wouldn't they want to make sure that the new registration got to the correct place so the voters could vote on election day? Yes, because you really want those people to vote for your canidate you would double and triple check the address.

So why send a flier to the heaviest D voting area in the state with the wrong address? The answer seems realitively clear to me. You are trying to create confusion.

Meade wrote:How do you know it was an effort to suppress votes and not an honest mistake?

Sure, Kathy Nickolaus might be in charge of the state GOP data base as well.

david cohen wrote:10 postcards could be an error. "An increasing number" only mailed to "heavily Democratic areas of Madison and Dane County" are clearly outside the realm of error.

As someone who does a crap ton of work with generating these kind of letters out of a database, the number of pieces don't matter, either the data being pulled from the database is correct, or it isn't. I would assume anything that went out would be proof read, but if you were generating a state wide mailing, it's conceivable that an error might be missed for some areas, though not seeing an issue with any letter going to Dane county seems pretty dubious.

It would be interesting to know who is in the GOP database, and find out how they got in there. According to the GAB, not all who are getting (and returning) the registration letters are unregistered voters.

It seems the simplest solution would be to bar 3rd party groups from sending out registration forms, or create a set packet that couldn't be modified or "enhanced" for said groups to send out.